Sustainability Journey: 2023 Highlights
INTRODUCTION
Sustainability is a journey of continuous improvement
Dominique Bossan | Knauf Insulation CEO for Europe, Middle East and Asia, Member of the Knauf Group Management Commitee
“When we committed to Put People First, Achieve Zero Carbon, Deliver A Circular Economy and Create Better Buildings, we set ourselves clear 2025 targets to benchmark our progress.
“As of 2023, I’m proud of what we’ve achieved. We are on track to meet our targets for carbon reduction and safety.
"We had a record response rate to our employee engagement survey, and experienced encouraging results.
“There remains however many areas to improve. It is why we share our sustainability progress every year. It is an annual reminder that sustainability is a not a destination but a journey of continuous improvement.”
Culture change is driving our sustainability success
Marc Bosmans | Group Sustainability Director
“2023 was an exciting year for sustainability at Knauf Insulation. We built a network of sustainability managers and engineers to connect every site and we started sustainability workshops for all our employees.
“We put sustainability at the heart of every project, business objective and communication. In other words, we implemented a major culture change.
“Now from the factory floor to every boardroom agenda, I’m proud to say sustainability drives all aspects of our business success.”
Exciting years for sustainability
Put People First
How we’re caring for our employees and communities
We’re on track to achieve our maximum Total Recordable Incident Rate of 5.0 by 2023 — a safety target which was fast-tracked from 2025. In 2022 our TRIR was 5.9 down from 6.4 in 2021.
In terms of providing a positive workplace, a record 83% of employees contributed their feedback in our third engagement survey in 2023. We saw improvement in our engagement score from 3.68 out of 5 in 2020 to 3.80 in 2023 (a slight dip from 2022’s 3.81).
We’re also seeing solid progress in our well-being programmes, Diversity and Inclusion initiatives and our community projects. We’re building on this success.
An inspirational culture change
Achieve Zero Carbon
Our progress towards net zero solutions
We cut our absolute full scope year-on-year greenhouse emissions by 8.2% in 2022. This has put us on track to achieve our 2025 target to reduce the embodied carbon of our products by 15% compared to 2021.
In 2022, we made a 63% year-on-year reduction in our scope 2 emissions (emissions from the electricity we buy) by securing renewable energy for our manufacturing. We also made small reductions in scope 1 emissions from our sites and scope 3 emissions from our value chain.
There’s a lot of work to do because our company is growing. However, we are accelerating our transition from fossil fuels, increasing efficiencies, and ensuring our assets have a low carbon footprint wherever possible.
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Deliver a circular economy
Our recycling success and zero waste challenge
In 2022 we improved the percentage of recycled content in our Rock Mineral Wool batch to 13% from 11% in 2021.
Unfortunately, our production waste to landfill increased by 47.8% from 2021 to 2022 due to challenges in the first year of a greenfield start-up plant.
In other areas progress is positive. Our water use is down by 14% from 2021 to 2022. In Continental Europe we now use 30% recycled content in our packaging and our pallet takeback scheme is delivering solid results in several countries.
Meanwhile our RESULATION service is successfully taking back customer waste from construction sites and demolition sites.
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CREATE BETTER BUILDINGS
How we’re campaigning for change
Our public affairs teams around the world campaigned to put building energy efficiency at the heart of policymakers’ agendas throughout 2023 and we saw some important developments.
We supported the publication of two studies that demonstrated how renovation could cut Europe’s energy demand by 44% and save Europe €3.5 trillion in energy costs over 20 years.
We backed new research that revealed how energy savings contribute a critical 12% to Europe’s energy mix and we launched a new tool to demonstrate how our solutions pay back their carbon footprint in just 95 days.
Putting theory into practice, we also unveiled a 63-building retrofit of social units in Belgium. The project highlighted how quality renovation improves lives, drives decarbonisation and generates energy savings. In this case, households recorded average energy savings of 60%.
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SUSTAINABILITY JOURNEY: 2023 HIGHLIGHTS
If you would like follow our sustainability journey in more detail as well as explore insight from our team, you can download our full report here.
